Over the weekend, some Rogers users in Cambridge, Ontario, suddenly lost their internet, TV, and phone service after someone deliberately damaged a fibre optic line – something Rogers says is part of a worrying trend of telecom vandalism across Canada.
The company said the damage happened close to Main Street and Regional Road 24 (Ainslie Street), where vandals tampered with part of its fibre network. Rogers confirmed they worked through the night to get things back up and running, while local police are looking into the incident.
“These types of repairs are complex and take time,” a Rogers spokesperson told Cambridge Today, noting that incidents like this have been happening more often lately.
Rogers added this was already their 15th vandalism-related outage this year in the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge and Guelph area. That’s about four to five times more than what they saw in 2022.
Nick Kyonka from the Canadian Telecommunications Association mentioned that telecom companies all over Canada are facing similar problems – including copper thefts and intentional equipment damage.
“These crimes lead to communities losing access to communications services, jeopardizing public safety, and disrupting local businesses and critical services,” Kyonka said. “To protect the public, we need tougher criminal laws that address these serious offences.”
Critics have pointed out how outages like these reveal a bigger problem: there isn’t enough backup or diversity in many telecom networks. Communications consultancy CPC wrote on X, “What is not covered in this outage story is that the lack of diversity and redundancy in the municipal distribution networks of large incumbent telecoms is why these fibre cuts result in outages and why they take so long to restore.”
This summer Bell also called out Cambridge as a hotspot for copper thefts amid an overall rise nationwide in vandalism targeting telecom systems over recent years.
